head to head · open source
NetData vs cilium
NetData has 80,561 GitHub stars, 6,630 forks, 393 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cilium has 25,232 stars, 4,071 forks, 1,085 open issues and last shipped yesterday. NetData leads on adoption by 219% (80,561 vs 25,232 stars). NetData is written in Go under GPL-3.0; cilium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. NetData has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, cilium 16%. NetData was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (cncf, kubernetes), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| NetData | cilium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 81K | ★ 25K |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.6K | ⑂ 4.1K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick NetData if
- You weight community size — 81K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cilium if
- You want the cilium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cilium fits your workflow better
About NetData
Netdata is an open source, real time infrastructure monitoring platform written in Go and released under GPL 3.0, built for operators and lean teams who need per second visibility across Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows systems.
read the full NetData overview →
About cilium
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution built on an eBPF based dataplane, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It lives in the Kubernetes ecosystem as a CNI implementation, and it is a CNCF project. At its foundation is eBPF, a Linux kernel technology that allows dynamic insertion of bytecode at integration points such as network IO, application sockets, and tracepoints, which is where Cilium implements its networking, security, and visibility logic. The project provides a flat Layer 3 network that can span multiple clusters in either native routing or overlay mode, and it is L7 proto…
read the full cilium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is NetData or cilium more popular?
NetData has 80,561 GitHub stars and cilium has 25,232. NetData has the larger community by that measure.
Are NetData and cilium free?
Both are open source. NetData is licensed under GPL-3.0 and cilium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between NetData and cilium?
NetData is written in Go and cilium in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, NetData or cilium?
Choose NetData if you want the larger community (80,561 stars) or its GPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose cilium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.